What is global studies?

![CDATA[Convinced that GS programs will earn a more prominent place within the quickly changing twenty-first-century landscape of higher education characterized by shrinking budgets and new modes of instruction, a growing number of academics – loosely referred to in this chapter as “global studies scholars” – have begun to synthesize various common theoretical perspectives and problem-oriented approaches. Their efforts have contributed to the necessary mapping exercise without falling prey to the fetish of disciplinary boundary making. Building on these efforts, I contend in this chapter that it is now possible to present GS as a reasonably holistic transdisciplinary project dedicated to exploring processes of globalization with the aim of engaging the complex global problems the world is facing in the twenty-first century (McCarty 2014). To this purpose, the next four sections of this chapter offer a general overview of the four major conceptual framings that give coherence to the field.]]